Tag: marketing

Are you struggling with your SEM plan? SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. It’s a simple idea, but it’s a powerful tool that should be taken seriously. Here are some tips to using SEM successfully.

Set and define a goal

In the big picture, everyone has a goal of making money, but that doesn’t usually happen overnight. Before you can really decide if a SEO campaign is right for your overall marketing plan, you have to set goals. These goals will help measure the progress.

Choose Keywords

A big first step is to find your “Keyword Gems.” Keyword Gems are keywords that you are already getting found for with low traffic, clicks, or page rank. You can find your Keyword Gems in the Google Analytics queries section or through a SEO tool like moz or soovle. Your keyword Gems can serve as the starting point for your keyword research process. You can expand on your keyword list by thinking of way to use variations with the same phrase and/or keyword.

Ad Copy

There is limited space for SEM ad copy, and it shows next to competition that is using the same keywords. Ad copy is extremely important. Unless you are able to entice a user to click on your ad, the steps to come won’t matter.

When writing the ad copy, look at the competition to see how they are targeting their SEM. What are they focusing on? It’s important to find ways to distinguish your ad from others and you’ll have a tough time doing so unless you know what your competitors are doing.

Landing Pages

Navigating users to a particular landing page is vital. Users want to go directly from the ad to the exact item it was offering. The content and URL for the landing page should be relevant to the keywords that the ad is using for targeting.

A successful landing page will make it clear what the next steps are, through a call to action. Make the call to action obvious with simple phrases like click here, call now, buy now, etc.

Finding success in SEM goes beyond setting up a keyword list and budget. It takes experimentation and strategic data analysis. Don’t be afraid to make changes and find what works best for you and your brand.

Review

It’s extremely important to stay on top of your bids for keywords. Stay on top of what is and isn’t working. Increase the spend on certain keywords and eliminate or decrease spend on other keywords that are not giving you the results that you want. While it may be time consuming to check this often, you will need to periodically adjust bids and conversion ratio for every keyword.

Make sure that you are looking at the relevant date. The more the better can be true in this situation, but it’s not always the case. Don’t wait to make changes due to worry about waiting long enough. Sometimes making changes will improve things, and sometimes making a change won’t change the results at all. Test out what works best for you.

Do you find yourself overwhelmed during the holiday season? Chances are that if you’re overwhelmed, so is your audience.

De-Stress the Holidays

As exciting as the holiday season is, it can be equally as stressful. Everyone is concerned about money, time, and keeping everything organized. The holiday season can be crazy and it’s important to not add to the overwhelming atmosphere. Be careful about adding another task to their holiday to-do list.

Try focusing on giving the audience some solutions to the holiday chaos. Simplicity is key. Guide the audience with content on how they can improve their holiday experience or keep things running smoothly while still enjoying themselves. Provide them with a five-minute solution, two-step fix, or other simple strategies to lighten the holiday load.

Use Nostalgia

The holiday season often focuses on nostalgia. Stick with the classic holiday figures and traditions to ease some of the typical stress. Add references to movies, characters, songs, etc to things that you’re doing. You can pull on their heartstrings with tradition and remind the target audience of their happy holiday memories.

Incorporate gentle, nostalgic themes in the content to easily connect with your audience.

Pick a Focus

The holiday season encompasses many celebrations, including Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Three Kings Day, the Winter Solstice, and more. Don’t dilute the content or the message of the brand by trying to incorporating them all. Instead, use certain phrases the can encompass them all by referring to it as the holiday season.

When decided how to approach the holiday season, it’s important to consider you brand. This might mean referring only to these events as “holidays” and putting your emphasis on time with family, food preparation, or meaningful gift-giving.

The History

Slightly fewer than 175 million are expected to celebrate Halloween this year.

One reason is that Halloween is such an affordable holiday. In comparison, it doesn’t cost as much as Christmas or Thanksgiving but still a lot of fun.

Shoppers are willing to spend money on something if it provides a lot of value. Halloween does that. They will spend a record $86.79 per person.

Trick-or-Treating

Dating as far back as the ancient pagan Celtic festival called Samhain–in which the end of harvest coincided with the opening of a liminal window into the spirit world–October 31st has always been an amalgamated swirl of sweets and the supernatural.

It wasn’t until 1934 that guising became known as trick-of-treating. The popularity of trick-or-treating briefly stalled during World War II due to sugar rationing, but by 1948, it was a common enough phenomenon that Jack Benny was doing jokes about it on his popular radio show, and by 1951, Charles Schultz was drawing the Peanuts gang wandering door-to-door wearing ghost sheets and witches’ hats.

Halloween was a thing people knew about, but before the 1950s, trick-or-treating simply wasn’t a part of most people’s Halloween celebrations. When the diminutive ghouls and ghosts did start showing up on people’s doorsteps, though, only sweets would placate them. Otherwise, you got egged , TP-ed, or worse.

What is the goal in the branding process? It is important to build brand equity for any company, and the branding process does just that. Brand equity is the set of assets, or symbols that highlight the value of your company’s services.

The following steps will help to build the branding for your company:

1. Define your brand

This is one of the most important steps in building a brand. By defining the brand and who you are, you are creating the foundation for the company. Moving forward, the brand definition will help by serving as a measurement when evaluating marketing strategies.

2. Determine objective

There are two important questions that will help define your brand objectives. The first question is: What do you want your brand to do for your company? The second is: What do you want others to know about your products and/or services?

3. Define and focus on target audience

Defining a target market will directly affect your brand effectiveness. There are key questions to know about the target audience in order to hone in on them:

Age

Income Range

Occupations

After you identify these aspects of the target audience, it is time to figure out what will most effectively appeal to that group.

4. Brand packaging

Once you have defined your company objective and brand, it is extremely important that the company image reflects them. Your company image is all about your brand packaging. The branding package should be unique to the company, like a face.

What is your company image conveying to your target audience? If it is not reflecting what you want your company seen as, change it.

5. Develop logo, website, toolkit, etc.

By leaving these developments for last, you will already have an idea of what you need visually to portray your brand. Use what you have built for your brand up to this point and have visuals that show your brand. It is important for your brand and visuals to all flow and work together for the company image.

It’s important to know that mobile apps aren’t just for big name brands. There are more small and mid-size businesses that are following the mobile trend because they understand that an effective mobile strategy involves more than just a mobile-friendly website.

You may even notice that many small businesses interact with their audience in their everyday life through their mobiles apps. These are the companies that are ahead of the game when it comes to taking their marketing to the next level.

Availability to Customers

Statistics show that the average American spends more than two hours a day on their mobile device. While it’s only a handful of apps that make up the bulk, users are still scrolling and scanning their device for the apps. Popping up during this can help your company get its name out there.

Direct Marketing Channel

Apps can serve many functions. They can provide general information, prices, search features, user accounts, messengers, news feeds, and many other options and tools .

A huge benefit of having a mobile app is that the information you’d like to give to customers is right there at their fingertips. Through tools like push notifications, you can get closer to customers and stay on their mind with direct contact

Value for Customers

Instead of sticking to the old point-collection card, digitizing any loyalty program you may have in place can make it possible for your customers to collect their rewards via your mobile app.

Stand Out

Mobile apps are still pretty rare for small businesses, and this is where the opportunity to take a big leap ahead of competitors.

Customer Loyalty

Last, but not least, the most important reason to build a mobile app is customer loyalty. There are so many different avenues to direct contact with the customer that it’s important to keep up your impact. It’s time to go back to making a true and sincere connection with customers, and making them a loyal follower of your product and/or service.

A mobile app is going to be a standard component of any business moving forward. The choice you make today will help set the foundation for the future of your business.

Are you a high achiever looking to join an energetic and driven team? Do you thrive in a creative environment full of talented (and occasionally quirky) people? We are looking for creative, driven, and independent self-starters to join our rapidly expanding team in Memphis.

At Crisp, our passion leads us to the crossroads of technology & marketing, and we embrace the work hard/play hard mentality. Most importantly, we place our trust in our employees and provide them with everything they need to live up to their full potential and grow both professionally and personally.

We are seeking a talented and motivated individual to empower the organization to be more data driven across the Marketing, Finance, and Product teams. A successful candidate will have a strong understanding of data manipulation, data relationships, spreadsheets, queries, and business intelligence tools. The position will perform deep analysis of performance data for internal consumption, as well as relentlessly pursue better ways to incorporate analytics into business processes and goals.

Happy (belated) Batman Day! What comes to your mind when you think of Batman?

Batman had his first appearance in comics in 1939. How has this character stuck around for 79 years, and how is he still so popular? The key is the brands ability to evolve and change with the times.

Batman hasn’t just adapted it’s ever changing logo, but also across media outlets. He has a strong presence in comics, novels, TV, film, and games.

The Name

The name Batman is a perfect example of how keeping things simple is one of the best ways to go. We can all learn a thing or two from the marketing behind Batman. While the name is a simple one, it still follows the three main rules in naming a brand.

Does it have a good ring to it?

Is it unique?

Is it short enough?

The Logo

The logo has seen some changes in its 79 years of use, but even so, it’s always associated with Batman. There are three main elements that every logo needs to tackle to be successful.

Consistency

Representation

Impact

The Tagline

What tagline do you associate with Batman? He’s been called many things over the years, but to name a few popular ones, The Caped Crusader, The World’s Greatest Detective, and The Dark Knight.

All of these taglines are packed full of meaning and speak to what kind of character Batman is.. It’s also important for the tagline to meet the same requirements as the name and logo to keep the image streamlined.

While a tagline can be a campaign core-message, it doesn’t have to be limited to that. The tagline should tell the audience more about the character instead of what the character is doing. A tagline is more flexible than other aspects of the branding, but it reflects the brand personality and maintains a stable image.

National Batman Day was September 15, 2018. How did you celebrate one of the most popular vigilantes of the past 79 years?

National Grandparents Day was September 9 this year. How did you celebrate?

What do you think of when you hear someone talking about grandparents? Times are constantly changing, but the role that grandparents play isn’t. The idea that they’re elderly and living in a retirement home is a dated one.

The average age that people are becoming grandparents in the US is 50 years old now. They are still working and living a very active lifestyle well beyond the age of 50.

There are several things that you should keep in mind when targeting them in your marketing plans.

1. They’re hip.

Grandparents are just as busy as everyone else, if not more. They have social media, email, and iPhones all the same too. Most grandparents are still working along with playing a large role in their families. It would be a big mistake on your part to discount them and how tech savvy they are.

2. What works?

They still respond well to direct mail, but don’t count them out with online marketing. They are constantly growing with their use of technology. They are often overlooked as a target group, so they respond well when they’re called out. Reaching out through email, video, and even Facebook are all successful methods.

3. They have influence.

They play a large role in deciding at least three generations worth of brand choices. Their role is a dominant one that helps pave the way of future generations. So many of them are making daily brand decisions, not only for themselves, but for their kids and grandkids as well. By playing this role, they’re influencing brand choices for the next two generations.

Grandparents have always played an important role whether it’s in the family landscape or in a marketing strategy, so don’t miss out on the potential that targeting them can open up for you.

The end of July is upon us, and the Crisp Team enjoyed another fantastic company outing! This time we all met up at the Rec Room here in Memphis where we played some arcade games, challenged each other in some video games, and enjoyed some pepperoni pizza and drinks! The summer days are still hot in Memphis, but this was one cool night out with Crisp Marketing!

Does email marketing really work? If you’re following these steps, the answer is yes.

Email is one of the most successful marketing mediums on the web now. Despite what some businesses may think about email marketing, it is the most reliable way to continue generating business.

1. Know Your Target Audience

This might be the most important email marketing tip. Your email content should always be relevant to your subscribers. It’s hard to lump all of your subscribers into one group, so don’t make the mistake of sending everyone the exact same email.

How can you do this? Email list segmentation lets you split your email list into sub-groups so you can target them better. Connecting with your audience is important in maintaining a relationship. Split your subscribers into groups such as sending frequency, past purchases, email activity, etc.

2. Utilize Your Subject Line

You should look at your subject line as your opening headline. Your open rate isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to creating your subject line. You don’t want them to just open your email, but you also need to build trust with your audience, and let’s face it, click-bait subject lines don’t do that.

3. Keep it Short

Great, you got them to open your email with that snazzy subject line! What now? It’s important to keep your emails simple and not load it down with a lot of text. For people to take the action you want, give them the facts and lead them to your site.

While we’re here, let’s talk about how to make your emails mobile-friendly. More people are checking their emails on their phones than desktops now and that changes how you should get your message across. Keep text to a minimum and use methods like bullet points to break up what you have to say.

4. Keep Your Emails Out of the Spam Folder

This step is extremely important. The last thing you want is for your carefully structured email to end up in the spam folder. In order to avoid this happening, make sure you’re following the guidelines for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act.

5. Be Consistent

This is where knowing the difference in spamming and legitimate email marketing comes into play. Your subscribers are on your mailing list by choice, and as long as you’re following the guidelines when it comes to spam, you should consistently send out emails. Don’t hesitate in sending those emails over the fear of being a spammer. You’re building relationships with your subscribers and you should reach out to them frequently.

Email marketing doesn’t have to be complicated if you pay attention to what your subscribers want. The tips mentioned will help you to do just that. This won’t happen overnight, but take it step by step and your campaign will grow.